Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume XXIII, Number 2 April, 1987 ********************************** -- 1 -- Marriage as a Symbol of Alienation in The Whirlpool W. Francis Browne Brooklyn College City University of New York A major theme presented in The Whirlpool1 shows how marriage as a viable institution impacts negatively on individuals living in an urban environment. In 1897, when Gissing published the story, the theme was not for him a new one. Indeed, in several of his previous novels his perspective on marriage itself is more incisive than that one finds in the works of his near or immediate contemporaries. Thus, in Dickens, Eliot, Moore, or even Hardy (if one exempts Jude the Obscure), marriage as an institution is not discussed per se but, rather, is *************************************************** Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110 La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to: C. C. KOHLER, 12, Horsham Road, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 2JL, England. Subscription Private Subscribers: £5.00 per annum Libraries: £8.00 per annum *************************************************** -- 2 -- accepted as part of the social and personal culmination of a series of romantic encounters or intrigues. This is not the case with Gissing. Among Gissing’s novels where the question of marriage is scrutinized to any degree, especially within a dynamic urban setting, The Odd Women comes to mind. In this story, the two older Madden sisters, for instance, never marry, but in their loneliness one, Alice, suffers from hypochondria, the other, Virginia, becomes a hopeless dipsomaniac. Monica, the youngest sister, marries a phlegmatic man, Widdowson, and they both are too insecure and egocentric to open their minds or hearts to each other, and their relationship ends tragically. The exception is Mary Barfoot, who, while not marrying, has relative financial security which enables her to pursue an individual social goal. She establishes a technical school for less privileged young women unlikely to marry, and who lack skills to function adequately in a changing society. With the assistance of Rhoda Nunn, whose superior intelligence and sense of purpose prompts her to dedicate her life to an ideal that excludes marriage, Mary fulfils herself and avoids any self-destructive habits. Everard Barfoot, her cousin, and a privileged young man of the world, feels threatened by the “new” woman, namely Rhoda Nunn, who rejects his masculine need to protect her. In The Odd Women, each of the characters is set against a background which witnesses changes in values, concerning the social and economic conditions of society, thus heightening the conflicts between men and women. Yet, the two principals, Everard Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, at least, experience the emotions of love, while neither, from strong convictions, gives in to his feelings. Barfoot does eventually marry, but Rhoda remains a spinster, unwilling to sacrifice her beliefs by submission to male authority in matrimonial life. The differences between The Odd Women and The Whirlpool are considerable, in that the -- 3 -- former concentrates on character interrelationships in the face of social and economic crises, while in the latter, the characters are victims of a process that affects the whole complexion of society and the way that society works. And underlying The Whirlpool’s varying perspectives is Gissing’s analysis of marriage as a symbol of the alienation between men and women. This alienation coincides with the rush of technological advancement and social upheaval affecting English middle-class life during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The two principal couples in the novel, Harvey Rolfe and Alma Frothingham, and Hugh Carnaby and Sibyl Larkfield, are victims of, as well as participants (along with their friends and acquaintances) in, the new way of life. Each relationship epitomizes the disruptive contemporary trends that Gissing observed in his era. The almost total absence of romance, or love, reflects the barrenness of a society that reduces emotions to sexual liaisons and the struggle for dominance of one sex over the other. In both relationships, emphasis is on self. While the two couples live in the same world, each member of each couple sees it in his own particular way. The four principals understand that to survive in the depersonalized commercial society of which they are part, self-preservation comes before feelings of mutual concern or personal commitment to one another. The overwhelming need each character has to control his personal destiny, paradoxically, creates the attraction each has for the other. Rolfe, for example, at the outset of the novel, wants to give some purpose to his life. He is described as a well educated man, “bookish” and philosophical; his tastes (natural to such a man) are conservative. Essentially a non-activist in the cares of the world, he yearns for the quiet contemplative existence of the amateur scholar. As the novel unfolds, we learn that Rolfe is full of contradictions, which, in its way, reflects the unstable conditions of the world in which he lives. He, along with his friend, Hugh -- 4 -- Carnaby, is a man shaped by a social frame that is outmoded in the fast-paced world he meets. He is torn between the values and virtues of the past and the exciting but uncertain “busyness” of present-day society. On one level he feels himself superior to the social climbers and speculators who feed off one another to gain prestige and recognition from their betters. At the same time he is drawn to the affluent lifestyle he sees around him, even though he knows that those most visible are shallow and have no idea about the precarious nature of their positions in life. Thus, Rolfe’s rationalized philosophy, in its seeming humanism, acts as a weapon to extract what benefits he can from those he both despises and envies. Once Alma Frothingham, a beautiful erstwhile heiress, is available to him, she becomes his means of realizing his “purpose,” that is, of claiming for himself one of the chief prizes of the social élite. The contradictions in Rolfe, however, are what gives the novel its essential meaning. For example, the early portion of the book has Rolfe, prior to Alma’s fall from her former social heights, commenting on the institution of marriage and its concomitant, children. First, he considers the broken marriage of his landlord, Buncombe, whose wife has left him to pursue a singing career in “second-rate halls.” Comparing himself to Buncombe, he says, that while having “run through follies innumerable” himself in his youth, he had not been “hampered” by marriage: “Sometimes,” he wonders, “by a freak of imagination he pictured himself a married man, imprisoned with wife and children amid these leagues of dreary, inhospitable brickwork, and a great horror fell upon him” (26). This section having to do with Buncombe and his wife serves, in its way, as an adumbration of what later happens to Rolfe in his relationship with Alma. Second, Rolfe’s seeming disdain for marriage contrasts with another ideal, the matrimonial -- 5 -- condition of his friend Basil Morton, even though he scorns it in principle. His implied comparison between the modern urban marriage of “misery,” as exemplified in Buncombe’s, Wager’s and Abbott’s relationships, and the old-fashioned idealized relationship found in the rural environment of the Mortons, shows a nodding tolerance for the latter, mainly because of where the couple live — in the country — and the apparently submissive nature of the country wife, as seen in Morton’s spouse. A third contradiction in Rolfe that heightens the conflict within him is his seeming lack of regard for children. After having received a letter from his friend Morton, in which the latter mildly complains about his domestic problems, Rolfe responds in a supercilious fashion: “All domestic matters,” he asserts, “were a trial to his nerves”: It seemed to him an act of unaccountable folly to marry a woman from whom one differed diametrically on subjects that lay at the root of life; and of children he could hardly bring himself to think at all, so exasperating the complication they introduced into social problems which defied common-sense. He disliked children; fled the sight and sound of them in most cases, and, when this was not possible, regarded them with apprehension, anxiety, weariness, anything but interest (20) [Italics mine]. Over and again in the early chapters of the novel, the reader receives this lament from Rolfe. When such words as “dislike children,” “fled the sight and sound of them,” “regarded them with apprehension, anxiety,” etc., are used to identify Rolfe as the consummate bachelor and cynic, they also presage what will mock him in his later marriage to Alma, and as father to their child. Rolfe, a man alone, self-consciously observant, aware of the chaotic society that threatens all who participate in it, really gives no clear reason as to why he dislikes children. He -- 6 -- comments on them mostly in the context of abandonment by parents who give them so little concern, and with respect to their levels of education, according to their social and economic status. For example, early in the novel he makes a reference to the tragic circumstances surrounding Wager’s abandonment of his children. Rolfe states that the forlorn husband’s frustrations were “a natural revolt against domestic bondage” (13); that Wager, on his wife’s death, should have “got rid of [the children] in some legitimate way” by having them placed in a state institution.
Recommended publications
  • George Gissing: London's Restless Analyst
    The Gissing Journal Volume XL, Number 3, July 2004 “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” Commonplace Book George Gissing (1857-1903): London’s Restless Analyst1 RICHARD DENNIS University College London “Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street. It is Saturday night, the market- night of the poor; also the one evening in the week which the weary toilers of our great city can devote to ease and recreation in the sweet assurance of a morrow unenslaved. Let us see how they spend this ‘Truce of God’; our opportunities will be of the best in the district we are entering.” The first words of Workers in the Dawn, the first published novel of the twenty-two-year-old George Gissing. I don’t think its most enthusiastic ad- vocate could claim that Workers in the Dawn is a masterpiece of English literature. But for all its faults it exemplifies a recurring characteristic of Gissing’s work, and the reason why I, as a historical geographer, have be- come a convert and, today, an enthusiastic proselytizer on his behalf. Gissing encouraged his readers to explore and, more than that, to engage with city life. Sometimes, like many earlier writers, he dealt in generic city- scapes—the “East End,” London beyond City Road, is described in the most general of terms—but more often, and especially in his later novels, Gissing’s London is very precisely defined: his characters live in real streets that the author has explored for himself, even in particular buildings.
    [Show full text]
  • Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Journal
    ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING JOURNAL “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ***************************** Volume XXXII, Number 2 April, 1996 ****************************** Contents A Distinguished Acquaintance of Gissing’s at Ciboure: Arthur Brownlow Fforde, by Pierre Coustillas 1 Between Emancipation and Restraint – Reading the Body in The Odd Women, by Mihoko Takeda 10 Shan F. Bullock: Gissing’s Admirer and an Ingenious Short Story Writer, by Masahiko Yahata 14 A Forgotten Assessment of Veranilda, by Randolph Faries, 2d 19 Gissing in the Boston Evening Transcript: His Interview by Joseph Anderson, by Pierre Coustillas 23 Book Review, by John Sloan 29 Notes and News 32 Recent Publications 34 Springtime in Northumberland, by Algernon Gissing 36 -- 1 -- A Distinguished Acquaintance of Gissing’s at Ciboure Arthur Brownlow Fforde Pierre Coustillas Until recently little enough was known of Gissing’s stay at Ciboure, the small fishing harbour adjoining Saint-Jean-de-Luz, from July 1902 to June 1903. He now kept his diary very irregularly and wrote down but few details about his social life. Correspondence with his relatives and friends was becoming infrequent; having to make a living by his pen, he concentrated on work as much as his health allowed. More numerous than those to any other correspondent at this time, his letters to his literary agent, James B. Pinker, are a faithful mirror of his professional activities, but of his non-literary occupations he said little to anyone. Rarely did he suggest that the trio he formed with Gabrielle Fleury and “Maman” enjoyed a pleasant and varied social life, that of the English colony.
    [Show full text]
  • Henry Ryecroft Meets Henry Maitland: George Gissing in and on Bloomsbury
    Henry Ryecroft meets Henry Maitland: George Gissing in and on Bloomsbury Richard Dennis Dept of Geography, UCL [email protected] Introduction George Gissing is not normally associated with Bloomsbury. He is a man of the slums, or on the margins, or maybe a cynical observer of the nouveau riche, but never a Bloomsbury academic or intellectual. And yet Bloomsbury featured prominently in both his own life and his work. In this paper I want to focus on (1) Gissing’s relationship with the British Museum; (2) his use of the streets and squares of Bloomsbury; (3) his own residence in various lodgings in Bloomsbury and how this translated into his novels; and (4) to reflect on his overall personification of Bloomsbury, including scenes from his novels that were apparently NOT based on his own particular experiences. The British Museum Gissing obtained his reader’s ticket for the British Museum Reading Room in November 1877, the day after his 20th birthday.1 In New Grub Street Edwin Reardon applies for his reader’s ticket on his 21st birthday, for which he needed “the signature of some respectable householder”.2 Gissing himself seems not to have had any difficulty getting his ticket, notwithstanding both his youth (he must have misrepresented his age and claimed to be 21) and his recently obtained criminal record.3 The British Museum was central to Gissing’s life in London, both as an impoverished writer, as a source of heat, light and running water as well as a site for research, and as a classical scholar.
    [Show full text]
  • Place and Class in George Gissing' S "Slum" Novels, Part I, by Pat Colling 3
    Contents Knowing Your Place: Place and Class in George Gissing' s "Slum" Novels, Part I, by Pat Colling 3 Gissing Reviewed on Amazon, by Robin Friedman 19 Notes and News 42 Recent Publications 43 ISSN 017-0615 The Gissing Journal Volume 50, Number 1,January 2014 "More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me." Commonplace Book Knowing Your Place: Place and Class in George Gissing's "Slum" Novels, Part 1 PAT COLLING The Gissing Trust Between 1880 and 1889 five of Gissing' s seven novels­ Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889)--were set in deprived neighbourhoods. All were concerned with life in penury, and had major characters who were working class. Contemporarynovelists and readers tended to see the poor as a cause; by the time Thyrza was published in 1887 George Gissing did not. By then he was not romanticising the working classes, nor presenting them as victims, nor necessarily as unhappy, and in this he can seem, to the reader expecting the established Victorian norm of philanthropic compassion, uncaring, even contemptuous. But his distinct representation of the poor-good, bad, and average-as they are, in the same way that novelists were already presenting the middle and upper classes, is respectfulrather than jaundiced. He sees them as individuals with differing characteristics, values, abilities, and aspirations, not as a lumpenproletariat in need of rescue and redemption. Gissing goes further than other novelists in 3 being willing to criticise the inhabitants as well as the slums, and he differs from them in his frequent presentation of the family as a scene of conflict rather than as the more familiar Victorian ideal of refuge.
    [Show full text]
  • Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter
    ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book ********************************** Volume XIX, Number 4 October, 1983 ********************************** -- 1 -- Gissing, Grant Allen and “Free Union” Alison Cotes University of Queensland At the end of Gissing’s novel of 1893, The Odd Women, Rhoda Nunn finally shows herself unwilling, in spite of her devotion to the feminist cause, to defy convention totally and enter into a free union with Everard Barfoot. On these grounds, Everard decides against forming a permanent relationship with her, and sums her up in these words: He had magnified Rhoda’s image. She was not the glorious rebel he had pictured. Like any other woman, she mistrusted her love without the sanction of society … He had not found his ************************************************* Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110-La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to C. C. KOHLER, 12, Horsham Road, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 2JL, England. Subscriptions: Private Subscribers: £3.00 per annum Libraries: £5.00 per annum ************************************************* -- 2 -- ideal – though in these days it assuredly existed.1 Everard’s ideal woman, brave enough to live out her rebellion against the convention of marriage while retaining her moral integrity, had hardly been the subject of serious English fiction before this date. Sally Mitchell2 mentions a number of novels of the mid-Victorian period where heroines of this kind occur, notably Matilda Charlotte Houstoun’s Recommended to Mercy, but they are for the most part novels of minor literary substance and even less influence.
    [Show full text]
  • Read PDF ^ Will Warburton (Dodo Press) (Paperback
    IOOOFIEUEAGD > eBook » Will Warburton (Dodo Press) (Paperback) W ill W arburton (Dodo Press) (Paperback) Filesize: 8.5 MB Reviews This publication is indeed gripping and intriguing. It is actually writter in basic terms and not difficult to understand. I am just pleased to explain how here is the greatest publication we have read through during my own lifestyle and could be he best pdf for at any time. (Ervin Crona) DISCLAIMER | DMCA WYE3NB0LBWAH < Doc » Will Warburton (Dodo Press) (Paperback) WILL WARBURTON (DODO PRESS) (PAPERBACK) To save Will Warburton (Dodo Press) (Paperback) PDF, remember to refer to the hyperlink beneath and save the document or have access to additional information which might be relevant to WILL WARBURTON (DODO PRESS) (PAPERBACK) book. Dodo Press, United Kingdom, 2007. Paperback. Condition: New. Language: English . Brand New Book ***** Print on Demand *****.George Gissing was an English novelist, who wrote twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. Although his early works are naturalistic, he developed into one of the the most accomplished realists of the late-Victorian era. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, to lower-middle class parents, Gissing went on to win a scholarship to Owens College, the present day University of Manchester. A brilliant student, he excelled at university, winning many coveted prizes, including the Shakespeare prize in 1875. Between 1891 and 1897 (his so-called middle period) he produced his best works, which include New Grub Street, Born in Exile, The Odd Women, In the Year of Jubilee, and The Whirlpool. The middle years of the decade saw his reputation reach new heights: by some critics he is counted alongside George Meredith and Thomas Hardy as one of the best three novelists of his day.
    [Show full text]
  • Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter
    ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume XIX, Number 3 July, 1983 ********************************** -- 1 -- Gissing out of Context : Denzil Quarrier Brian Robert Walker Wymondham College, Norfolk [This is the first of a series of articles reproduced from an unpublished M.A. thesis which Brian Walker summed up as follows on p. IV of his bound typescript: In this thesis I question the traditional focus of attention on Gissing’s work which seems to be primarily concerned with the social and historical aspects of his novels and with the personality of the author himself. ************************************************* Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial Correspondence should be sent to the Editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110-La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to C. C. KOHLER, 12, Horshani Road, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 2JL, England. Subscriptions: Private Subscribers: £3.00 per annum Libraries: £5.00 per annum ************************************************* -- 2 -- I attempt to consider the novels as works of art, as products of the imagination, as transfigurations and transmutations of reality, and to assess their value as expressing wider truths about the human condition. I examine Gissing’s treatment of character and his analysis of motivation and the springs of action and focus attention, particularly on his employment of irony as a reducing though positive technique. I conclude that each novel, whilst it is centred on a particular contemporary development or phenomenon, such as the cult of Aestheticism or the question of female emancipation, is concerned to stress that a complete allegiance to an ideology or social theory is damaging to full personal development.
    [Show full text]
  • Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter
    ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book ********************************** Volume XVIII, Number 1 January, 1982 ********************************** Who are all these good-looking and happy people? The best-dressed group of 1981? No, they are participants at the Gissing Symposium held at Wakefield last September. STANDING (left to right): John Halperin, Gillian Tindall, John Goodchild, Peter Keating, C. J. Francis, Frank Woodman, Mr. Bird, Jacob Korg, Malcolm Allen, Pierre Coustillas, Michel Ballard, Ros Stinton, David Dowling, David Grylls, Patrick Parrinder, Douglas Hallam, Kate Taylor, Terry Wright, Francesco Badolato, John Harrison, Rick Allen, Clifford Brook. SITTING (left to right): Anne Peel, Elizabeth Foster, Cynthia Korg, Chris Kohler, Kelsey Thornton, Tricia Grylls, Maria Chialant, Mabel Ferrett, M. Clarke, P. Clarke. -- 2 -- The National Weekly: A Lost Source of Unknown Gissing Fiction Robert L. Se1ig Purdue University Calumet Undiscovered Gissing fiction most certainly awaits whoever can find an 1877 file of the National Weekly. This highly ephemeral Chicago publication at times carried the alternate titles of Carl Pretzel’s Weekly or Carl Pretzel’s Illustrated Weekly. The only library known to possess any holdings of it, the library of the Chicago Historical Society, has one issue apiece from 1875, 1876, 1878, and 1880 but none from the year when Gissing lived in that Midwestern American city. His only extant story from the National Weekly – “A Terrible Mistake” (5 May 1877, p. 10) – survives in a page of the paper kept by Gissing himself. In Notes and Queries of October 7, 1933, the bookseller M.
    [Show full text]
  • George Giaaing, Hie Life End Work Margaret Ionise Flock Submitted in Partial Fulfillmont of the Requirement* for the Degree of M
    George Gissing; his life and work Item Type text; Thesis-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Fiock, Margaret Louise Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 07/10/2021 12:24:03 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/553950 George Giaaing, Hie Life end Work bj Margaret Ionise Flock Submitted in partial fulfillmont of the requirement* for the degree of Master of Arts in the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences of the University of Arizona <1cXV: O F / f a ? 2 9 G20RGE GI3SI5G, HIS LIFE AMD WORK. OUTLIHE Introdao tlon. A# Farpoae? to show Gl88lag's place as a m m of let­ ters and to trace the factors which gave him this place. 1. Through a study of Gleslag's life. 2. Through a study of Gissing'a works. 3. Through a study of Giesing's place as & man of letters. B. Statement: to give a summary of the work already done in the field, its value and emphasis. I. The life of George Giseing as reflected throu^i his Letters and Ryeoroft Papers. A. Early life from 1857-1877. 1. Parentage. 2. Boyhood. 3. Schooling. 4. American experience. B. Life from return from America to first Italian vis­ it, 1877-1888. 1. German experience. 71716 3 S» Marriage (first)* 3, W?rtorg..in DagSLto JDemos * 4* Demos to first Italian rleit* 0# M f e from return from Italy to Ionian Sea vimlt, 1888-1898, 1» Marriage (second)♦ 2.
    [Show full text]
  • The Gissing Newsletter
    THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume XI, Number 4 October, 1975 ********************************** -- 1 -- Sleeping Fires as a Thematic Ramble through Gissing’s Devices and Patterns Michel Ballard University of Lille In his introduction to Sleeping Fires (recently published by the Harvester Press) Professor Coustillas observes that the book “deserves attention on more counts than one,” and that “the novel derives its interest from the special place it occupies in Gissing’s rich thematic pattern.” Both statements contradict the persistent belief that this neglected short novel is almost alien to the author’s production and of little value. The book, in fact, suffers from the same kind of prejudices as Eve’s Ransom owing to its size, rapidity of execution, and to Gissing’s habit of disparaging his own work. Yet the reviews of the first edition (to be found in Gissing: The Critical Heritage) were far from unfavourable, but quite typically they concentrated on what is new in the book and *************************************************** Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial correspondence should be sent to the editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110-La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to: C. C. KOHLER, The Gatehouse, Coldharbour Lane, Dorking, Surrey, England. Subscriptions Private Subscribers: £1.00 per annum Libraries: £1.50 per annum *************************************************** -- 2 -- reviewers were inclined to sever it from the author’s previous production. There is no denying the conciseness of the novel nor its unusual turn, particularly at the end.
    [Show full text]
  • The Place of Bloomsbury in the Novels of George Gissing
    Opticon1826 , Issue 7, Autumn 2009 THE PLACE OF BLOOMSBURY IN THE NOVELS OF GEORGE GISSING By Professor Richard Dennis The Victorian novelist, George Gissing, is not often associated with Bloomsbury. Yet among his twenty-three novels published between 1880 and 1905, at least nine contain scenes set in the area between Oxford Street and Euston Road, Tottenham Court Road and Gray’s Inn Road.1 We do not need a novelist to tell us about the topography of Victorian London or even to describe the conditions in which Londoners lived: there are more than enough social surveys, tourist guides and journalistic ‘explorations’ of ‘how the poor live’. But novels are invaluable in showing how the spaces of the city were perceived and used and how the city was ‘performed’ in everyday practice. So in this paper I am interested in how Gissing made use of the area’s geography and how his characters moved through Bloomsbury and the wider metropolis at a variety of scales. My starting point is Henri Lefebvre’s discourse on The Production of Space and his conceptual triad of ‘spatial practices’, ‘representations of space’ and ‘representational spaces’ (Lefebvre 1991). In the readings of most commentators, ‘representation of space’ is a conceptual act undertaken by planners, politicians, academic theorists and novelists – in other words, the discourse of the powerful, telling us how we should think about the organization of space – whereas ‘representational spaces’ are the spaces of resistance, of carnival, of subversion, the appropriation of space by the powerless or, more generally, ‘spaces that are lived, experienced and recoded through the actions of those who occupy and use them’ (Elden 2009, 590).
    [Show full text]
  • Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter
    ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume XXIV, Number 4 October, 1988 ********************************** -- 1 -- Charles Lamb and Born in Exile M.D. Allen University of Jordan Amman I have pointed out in a previous article1 that when Gissing was faced with the problem of writing a fictional version of the Owens College catastrophe in Born in Exile he found an objective correlative in the plight of one Joseph Favell. Favell was a poor but proud student at Oxford who could not tolerate his tradesman father’s obsequious fawning before those – his friends and academic peers, perhaps – who might give him work. The agonized young man left Oxford, took a commission in the army, and was killed in 1812. We owe the inexpressibly vulgar Andrew Peak and his restaurant, and Godwin’s consequent abandonment of Whitelaw College, at least in part, to Gissing’s recognition in Joseph Favell of some of his own attitudes *************************************************** Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110 La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to C. C. KOHLER, 12, Horsham Road, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 2JL, England. Subscriptions Private Subscribers: £5.00 per annum Libraries: £8.00 per annum *************************************************** -- 2 -- and preoccupations. Gissing came to know of Favell through Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays of Elia (1833), where he appears as F― in the former collection and W― in the latter.
    [Show full text]